Masculine writing Uses the economy of the phallus

•  This means that:
• It aims to present a unified truth (there has to be a bottom line, a point, a take home message, an argument with a conclusion).
• becomes stationary static and unchangeable (It is a success if it becomes something that we can put down in history texts that will stay the same)
• It places itself at the center and tries to marginalize everything else in relation to it (Bible (the plants and the animals and the garden and eve, were all created for man) and evangelism (Christianity is a rare kind of religion that entails evangelism, it is necessary to go out and conquer other kinds of ideas))
• It casts everything else into the role of Other (example, what gets to count as Canon in a discipline, philosophy major)
• Other things have meaning only in relation to it (an idea and criticisms of that idea – we have never studied a section on Elshtain, but we have looked at her in relation to other sets of ideas)

• Masculine writing looks at the world in terms of binary opposites.
• Culture/ nature
• Active/ passive
• Speaking/ writing
• High/ low
  
  
• These dualistic, binary opposites map onto the BIG dualism: Man/woman
• Woman exists in man’s world, on his terms defined by the fact that she is different from him.
• If woman refuses to be defined as man’s Other then she is unthinkable, there is no place for her in language or culture, in some sense, doesn’t exist.
• Think of the omission of women’s perspectives in history for example